Workout Journal – 4/17/17 – Chest and Shoulders and Triceps, oh my!

I feel like Steve Martin in the The Jerk – “The new phone books are here, the new phone books are here!” except it’s “The new workouts are here, the new workouts are here!”

If there is any magic voodoo in P90X it’s that Tony and his team figured out that one of the major reasons people bail on their workout programs is that they just flat out get bored.

There is a pretty sound logic to doing chest and back on Monday, shoulders and arms on Wednesday and leg day on Friday. Heck, I can go to my library right now and grab 10 different books, written by 10 different trainers/authors and find a version of that pattern, with slight variations, in all of those fitness books. Throw in cardio on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday and you’ve got every strength training book/program written from the mid 1960s to the middle of the last decade.

What P90X throws into the mix are two main changes:

Instead of cardio on Thursday you do yoga.

After 3 weeks of doing one set of workouts you do a recovery week (with a whole new set) and then swap out a couple of the core strength routines for two new routines that work the same muscles…. and we’ll switch days up a bit.

I’ve said it before, and actually figured it out back the first time I did P90X – “muscle confusion” is a marketing gimmick. There really is no such thing. You’re not confusing your muscles. You’re stopping your stupid ape brain from telling you you’re bored. So, in one sense, it’s nonsense. In another it’s genius, because ultimately the difference between an effective exercise program and an ineffective one is the effective one is one you stick with long enough to actually get positive results.

If I can get you to keep doing a daily workout, and working hard enough each day for it to be meaningful, for 90 days you’ll see and feel positive changes. Nothing magic about that. And if I can convince you to dump your stupid biases and do just one yoga routine a week I’ll really change your life.

So, I was getting bored. Especially since I repeated week 3 because of my Bahamas-themed recovery week. I was more than ready to switch things up today. More than ready.